


amnesia

by queerholmcs



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Coma, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-18
Updated: 2015-03-19
Packaged: 2018-02-26 04:44:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 17,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2638535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queerholmcs/pseuds/queerholmcs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>noun: loss of a large block of interrelated memories; complete or partial loss of memory caused by brain injury, shock, etc.</p><p>Sherlock and John are happily together. Sherlock goes to NSY to take care of the paperwork he's meant to do after a case. There's a bombing and the building collapses on him. He survives; his memories of John do not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. like we never happened

**Author's Note:**

> this is not beta'd or britpicked.  
> if you're looking for a happy ending, i cannot promise when it will come.

“You’ll come back?”

Sherlock smiled and kissed John lightly.  “Before you know it.”

John smiled.  “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

-

No-one was worried that John wasn’t going to recover.  He had been quickly stabilized once at hospital, and they were only keeping him the mandatory twenty-four hours for observation.  Sherlock thought he should have been quicker to realize what was happening, when John had heard someone still in the bedroom of the flat that was the crime scene, but John didn’t blame him for not knowing right off that it was insulin the suspect had injected John with before shooting himself in the mouth.  Glucagon had been found and administered, and John was fine.  Sherlock just had to wrap up a few things in the way of paperwork at New Scotland Yard.  Routine, and required, however tedious.

-

“Shut up and let me through! I’m fine!” John shouted at the nurse who was fruitlessly trying to get him back to bed.  “A fucking building just collapsed on my boyfriend!”

It had not been a whole building, but rather a corner of New Scotland Yard which had been bombed.  The corner included four and a half floors burnt to a crisp, and concrete crumbling down to the ground level over the staircase Sherlock had been jogging up to get to Lestrade’s office, because the lift had been oh-so-conveniently out of service.

John was let in to see him, after all injuries needing immediate care had been attended to, and his breathing and heart rate had been stabilized.

The diagnosis wasn’t difficult.  His injuries would heal just fine, from the burned skin to the crushed ribs and the collapsed lung.  What wasn’t so certain was when he was going to wake up from his coma.

-

Three weeks, two days, nine hours, five minutes, and thirty-two seconds after being moved to the ward reserved for coma patients, Sherlock’s breathing hitched and his hand tightened almost imperceptibly in John’s.

John picked his head up.  If he wasn’t at work, he was in the chair by Sherlock’s bed, and when he could no longer fend off sleep, a nurse would bring him a spare blanket and he would curl his feet up next to him in the chair.

“Sherlock?” John finally dared to ask.

The man’s eyes opened at last, and he groaned with the ache of a month of lying in bed.

John grinned and the crushing weight of four and a half floors of New Scotland Yard was lifted from his chest.  He thought he might cry.  "Sherlock, oh God -”

Sherlock’s eyes scanned John.  John assumed he was determining how long he had been unconscious, how much time John had been spending at his bedside, how many people were irrationally worried about him.

He wasn’t.

“Did Mycroft send you?” Sherlock asked.

The weight came plummeting back and barely stopped when it hit John’s chest.  His throat went dry, his vision black at the edges.  He blinked.  “What?”

“My brother,” Sherlock said, as though that had been what John was questioning.  “He always worries.  Barely trusts me to get the post from the box downstairs without calling my dealer.  Ex-dealer, now.”  His head turned to track the nurse who had come in to take note of his vitals, and then she left and went to fetch a doctor.

“Hopefully they’ll be quick about it,” Sherlock went on.  “I imagine the detective inspector will have one or two cases for me to look at.  I’ve been out, what, a month?”

John’s leg began to burn with pain.  He dug his nails into the thigh through the thick denim of his jeans.  “Three weeks,” he managed.  He forced himself to his feet.  “I’m going to… let your brother know you’ve woken up.”

Sherlock nodded, though he very clearly did not care one way or the other if Mycroft knew now or a week from now.

John left the room, limping heavily on his right leg.

-

“He doesn’t remember me.”  He said the words before Mycroft could say so much as ‘hello’, for fear of not being able to say it at all.

The response took a moment.  “Sherlock?”

“Sherlock doesn’t – doesn’t remember me.  I don’t -”  John’s breathing grew more shallow each time he said it.

There was a sound like the closing of a laptop, and then of the dropping of heavy papers or books, on Mycroft’s end of the call.  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Mycroft said.  “See if his memory is lacking on anything else.  Probably best not to force him into accepting anything he doesn’t know, at this point.”  He at least waited for John to say a wavering ‘okay’ before ending the call.

-

It was another ten minutes before John felt that he had garnered enough control over his eyes, which were rapidly tearing up, and his breathing, which had been bordering on hyperventilation, to be able to reenter the ward and take his seat by Sherlock’s bed again.

“Why don’t you tell me about yourself, Sherlock?” John asked.

Sherlock barely let him get the words out.  “If you’re a doctor here, which only makes sense, why do you keep using my first name?”

John bit hard on the inside of his cheek.  “Makes it less formal,” he said, “which I find can be better in some situations.”

Sherlock scowled, but did accept the explanation.

“So why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

“What about me?”

John glanced down to where the charts were hanging at the foot of the bed, and then back up at Sherlock.  “Where do you live?”

“Kensington,” Sherlock answered with ease.  “Next?”

John hesitated.  “People say they’ve seen you at Baker Street a lot,” he started.  “Why is that, if you don’t live near there?”

“Mrs Hudson runs a café.  I helped her out with a certain situation in America some years back, so she gives me coffee and biscuits when I’m in the area.”

“Why are you in the area?”

“I’m a consulting detective, I help people solve their problems, including the police.  I end up in central London a lot,” Sherlock said.

John nodded, and allowed himself a moment to breathe.  “Do you live alone?”

“No one can stand me well enough for it to be otherwise.”

“And you can afford Kensington?”

Sherlock shrugged.  “My brother put me up there.  We didn’t see many other options at the time.”

“Have you been there long?” John asked.

“Seventeen years.  Gave me the keys for my twentieth birthday, he’d been keeping me in his guest room for a bit before that.  Like I said, he doesn’t trust me.”  Then, before John could get another word in, he went on.  “Really, how much longer is it going to be?”

Probably fortunately, Mycroft walked in then.

“Three days, possibly a week,” Mycroft answered.  He was unfazed by Sherlock’s glare.  “You have been comatose for nearly a month, it is only protocol for them to ensure that you are, in fact, physically and mentally stable.”  He leaned his umbrella against the foot of the bed and flipped through Sherlock’s charts.

John all but sprinted from the room.

“What’s wrong with him?” Sherlock asked, eyes tracking him until the door closed behind him.

“No idea.”  Mycroft replaced the charts and sighed.  “Nerves, probably.  He hasn’t been able to converse properly with you in a month.  Mrs Hudson has, of course, meddled with all of your experiments, though I expect you can trust John to fix that before you’re released, now that he can stop wondering when you’re going to wake up.”

Sherlock looked at his older brother blankly.

Mycroft stepped to the side of the bed and placed his keys on the table, including, in the pile, a key to the flat he really had put Sherlock up in when he was twenty.  The Holmes name had remained on the lease even after Sherlock had moved out, a ‘just in case’ measure, and so it was still furnished and usable, though to the best of Mycroft’s knowledge, Sherlock had not been there in at least five years.

Apparently, that was about to change.

“I take it you don’t recognize the names.”

“The context,” Sherlock amended.  “Mrs Hudson runs the café on Baker Street.  But I don’t know why she would ever be meddling with my things, nor why any John should be fixing them, unless he’s a new intern at Bart’s.”

Mycroft nodded.  “I wouldn’t expect you to, of course.  Simply a test.  I thought you might not take well to a formal psychiatric evaluation.”

“Oh.  No, not well at all,” Sherlock agreed.  He folded his hands on his stomach and began to tap his fingers in violin finger patterns, as he had often done before when he was anxious or bored or his hands were currently unoccupied, really.

“Some people, after waking from a coma, cannot recall exactly what is real for them, and so will agree with whatever they are told is their reality, and will accept it quickly and willingly,” Mycroft went on.

Sherlock shrugged.  “Well, some people are stupid.”

Mycroft smiled tightly.  “They’ve ordered another MRI for you, as well as a blood test and a number of other things they have not done since you were admitted.  You know why you were admitted?”

“Lift was out of order so I took the stairs to Detective Inspector Lestrade’s office.  Evidently, there was a bomb a floor or so above me.”

Mycroft nodded.  “They want to compare the results of the tests now with those of the tests done three and a half weeks ago, to make sure nothing has changed too drastically.”

“Well.  I’m sure I’m fine.”

-

Three days later found John staring at a printout of an MRI of the brain of Holmes, Sherlock.

“This is the wrong one, then!”

“Sir, you have been here the entire time.  You saw us take him into the room, you watched the screens as we scanned him, and you saw it print,” one of the neurologists said in a pathetic attempt to calm him down.

John finally tore his eyes from the scan and leaned against the table.  “Something has to be wrong,” he said.  “I don’t know what, but it has to be something.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the neurologist started.  “But nothing has changed between the last one and this, and there are no abnormalities.  I can compare it to any other scans in his file, but – I don’t think we’re going to find anything else.  As far as we can tell, his brain is completely normal.”

 -

Sherlock was going to be released from hospital in forty-eight hours, assuming the scans found nothing new between now and then.  And as far as he was concerned, he was going back to his flat in Kensington.  It fell to Mycroft to attempt to talk him out of it, convince him of what his reality actually was, then, because John could no longer bear to sit and converse with Sherlock like they were strangers.

“It might be good for you to be with someone else right now.  I’m sure the staff here would prefer it to having to rely on outpatient visits.  You’ve never been consistent with those,” Mycroft attempted to reason.

“Then I can take your guest room again.”

“I moved to a new flat about a month ago.  Closer to my office.  No guest room.”

Sherlock sighed.

“There’s a second room at Doctor Watson’s flat.  He’s told me he won’t mind.”

Sherlock plucked the O2 monitor from his finger and the IV from his arm.  “You’re desperate to have me move in with him.  I don’t know why.  I don’t care why.”

Mycroft watched him stand and pull from under the bed that box that contained a clean set of clothes, intended for his release.  “What are you doing?”

“Leaving.”  He took the clothes and walked to the bathroom before Mycroft could stop him.  A few minutes later, he emerged, dressed in his usual suit and a burgundy shirt.  “I’m fine, there’s nothing wrong with me, you’re all being remarkably stupid about all of this.  I’ll be at my flat if you need me.  Feel free to bring gifts.”

Mycroft did not stop Sherlock from leaving the room.

-

It was two days before John forced himself to call Mycroft and ask for the address of Sherlock’s flat in Kensington, and another six hours before he worked up the courage to call a cab to actually take him to the place.

He used the passcode Mycroft had given him to get in the front door, and then stared at the lift for seven minutes or so before jabbing his thumb onto the button for the sixth floor.

Sherlock muttered something under his breath, possibly not in English, when three rapid raps at his door interrupted his composing.  He lowered the instrument and carried it with him to the door, sighed, and opened it.

John only looked at him for a minute.  He looked exactly the same, how was it even possible he didn’t remember him?

“I thought we agreed I wouldn’t be needing any follow up appointments,” Sherlock finally said.  “Though I suppose you want me to be impressed with your willingness to do house calls.”

John wet his lips.  “No,” he said.  “I mean – yes, we – we did agree that, but – well, we did agree that, so that’s not why I’m here.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because -”  He cut himself off; what was he supposed to say?  Because you’re my boyfriend and we’ve lived at 221B Baker Street for four years and I don’t understand why the hell you can’t just remember me?

Sherlock cleared his throat.  “Right, then,” he said, and he started to close the door.

“Sherlock, wait!”

The door was stopped at the halfway point.  “Yes?”

John looked down and closed his eyes and forced himself to breathe.  “I – I’ve got some of your things at my flat.  Um – your brother, he wanted me to – keep an eye on them, while you were – you know.  So if you wanted to come back with me and I could make sure you get everything -”

Sherlock sighed through his nose.  “I have everything I need here.  Good afternoon, doctor.  I expect to never see you again.”

John’s nails carved crescents into his palm.  “Do you really not remember me?” he forced himself to ask.

Sherlock’s eyes flicked down John’s figure, and then back up.  “There are over eight million people in London.  Even if our paths did cross once, there is no reason for me to remember it.  Good afternoon.”  This time, Sherlock really did close the door, firmly, and then lock it before picking up his composing as though there had been no interruption at all.

John stared blankly at the door for several seconds, until his eyes pricked with tears, and he rubbed his face and took a deep breath and took the lift back down to the ground floor and told himself that this wasn’t the end of it, that there was some way to get through to him, that he wasn’t going to give up on it just because of a goodbye and a closed door.


	2. was it just a lie?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock continues to settle into his solitary life, and John continues to attempt to convince him of what he knows was real.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for recreational drug use in this chapter

Sherlock spent his days with his attention divided between composing on his violin, learning piano because it really was about time he made use of the upright piano in the corner of the spare bedroom, experimenting in the kitchen, and reading newspapers in search of cases or scientific papers in search of new ideas or the latest bestseller from amazon-dot-co-dot-uk – he wasn’t certain why he bothered with the last one, but he did.

-

John called Greg after dinner one week after his visit to Sherlock’s new flat, which could, by all standards, be counted a failure.

“John, hey,” Greg said, sounding far too cheery for John’s liking – but then, most things were.  “Sherlock out of hospital yet?  I’ve got one or two cases he might like to take -“

“Sherlock’s not staying with me anymore,” John said.  The sooner the detective inspector knew, the better, though why he didn’t know already was a mystery.  “He… doesn’t remember me.  He’s staying back at his old flat in Kensington.”

The line fell silent for a few long moments.  John rubbed at his leg.  Greg sighed, finally.  “Oh,” he said.  “I’m – shit, I’m sorry.  You want to do drinks, or…”  He let the question trail off.

“No, I don’t think so,” John said.  “I just – I mean, there’s got to be a way to… trigger something, get the connection back or whatever, so – I wondered if you’ve still got the files from the cases he and I have done?”

“Yeah, they should all be down in storage.  I can take a look tomorrow.”

John sighed, at least partially relieved to have some form of a plan to rely on.  “That’d be good, thanks.”

“I’m here if you need anything else, you know?”

“No, I do, just,” John paused, and sighed again.  “I just need to sort through everything myself right now.  I’ll see you around.”  He hesitated a fraction of a second, not quite long enough for Greg to say anything else, and then hung up.

-

It was after nine when John went downstairs to answer the knock at the door.  Three boxes stacked, one on top of the other, a pair of legs, and a voice.

“This is all of them,” Greg said from behind the boxes.  John reached up to take the top one from him.  Greg offered a tense smile.  “Where do you want them?”

John stepped to the side and nodded up the stairs.  “Just put them anywhere.”

Greg stepped in and kicked the door shut behind him, and led the way upstairs.  John took his time following a minute later, limp having grown more pronounced with each passing day.

The boxes were stacked on the floor in front of the fireplace.

“Um – thanks.  For this,” John said after a few moments.

“No problem,” Greg said.  “Sure there’s nothing else you need?”

John shook his head.  “Nothing now.”

Greg nodded, and then just looked at John for a moment and realized the full force of what had happened – he had heard that something hadn’t been quite right with Sherlock after he’d woken up, but he’d heard no details, and now that he did…  He couldn’t imagine what it was like for John right now.  He nodded again.  “I’ll see you around,” he said, and then he left, and closed the door quietly behind him.  He wasn’t certain John noticed.

-

John lost himself in those case files.  He spent hours poring over them, memorizing every last detail.  If only to convince himself they were real, that his time with Sherlock had been real, that it was not him who was losing everything that could have ever mattered to him.

He spent his days at the clinic – he volunteered to take the extra shifts, and to cover for others.  He found a position in the A&E at a nearby hospital, and spent his nights there.  If he was lucky, he might sleep for a few hours between the two.  But he wasn’t often lucky.

It was eleven o’clock in the evening on a Saturday when John knocked at Sherlock’s new flat once again.  He hadn’t known what to do with himself when the supervisor at the A&E said they wouldn’t be needing him tonight, so he picked up a few of the most memorable case files and hailed a cab.

Sherlock didn’t make John wait long before he opened the door, especially considering the hour.  But as the door opened, John could hear two recordings, one of a violin, and one of a piano.  Sherlock was composing, for two instruments now.

“What do you want?” Sherlock demanded upon realizing who it was.

John forced himself to look Sherlock in the eye.  It didn’t help that there was no hint of recognition, and worse, there was a definite annoyance instead.  The way one might greet the annoying salesman.  John could feel his heart shattering, slowly.

“I just wanted to give these to you,” John said.  He offered up the stack of files he had selected.

Sherlock eyed them suspiciously, and skimmed the titles.  “A dozen solved cases?”

“I – I helped you on these cases.”  John couldn’t quite keep his voice from cracking.

“No, you didn’t.  I work alone.  Always have.”

John closed his eyes for a moment and ordered himself not to cry.  He flipped open the case on the top of the pile, the one which had been dubbed ‘A Study in Pink’ on his blog.  It seemed a lifetime ago, now.  “Here.  A cabbie forcing people to commit suicide by choosing between two pills.  He was making you take a pill, in a room at Roland-Kerr Further Education College.  I shot him before you could take the pill.”

Sherlock sighed.  “No, you didn’t.  No-one shot him.  I chose the pill correctly.  He took the poison, and died.”

“It’s right here!”  John flipped a few pages further in the file, to a photograph of the cabbie lying dead on the floor, blood pooling from his shoulder.  “I’m not lying!”

“Congratulations, my brother is capable of faking a file.  Pass on my compliments,” Sherlock said drily, and then slammed the door in John’s face.

John’s leg gave out, and he didn’t stop himself from falling to the ground in a heap, and he didn’t stop himself from crying, and he didn’t stop the files from scattering around him.

A church bell tolled midnight.  He rubbed at his face and took enough deep breaths to be able to focus on what was in front of him again, and then he took his time putting the scattered papers back in their respective files.

When he left to take the stairs down and then walk back to Baker Street, limp prominent as ever, there was a neatly arranged stack of files centered in front of Sherlock’s door.

Sherlock opened the door the next morning to go and check the mail, and he sighed in annoyance when he saw the files.  He picked them up and dropped them on the kitchen table, and although he had no intention of reading them, he did nothing more to dispose of them, either.

-

John spent the next few days cleaning the flat during the hours he actually spent at home and was unable to sleep during.  He took pictures of anything and everything that had even the least connection to Sherlock – the skull, the violin, the German textbooks, the laptop, the chemistry set, the rotting fingers in the fridge, the clothes hanging in the closet.

These pictures were sent to Sherlock via text.  Sherlock, upon receiving each one, clenched his jaw and deleted the text.  After the twentieth message, he blocked John’s number from his phone entirely.

John had to remind himself to breathe when he received the ‘Delivery Failed!’ notification for the third time in a row, and realized that this was what Sherlock wanted.

-

Sherlock was carrying on like nothing had happened.  Like he had never been at Bart’s that day when Mike Stamford introduced him to John Watson.  Like he wasn’t missing anything, like John had never meant anything to him at all.

It killed John to know this.  To be waiting to hear Sherlock’s deductions on the woman crossing the road in front of their cab, and then to realize it wasn’t going to come.  To see a head of dark curls or a long coat entering the clinic or the A&E, and then to have to tell himself he was stupid for hoping Sherlock would have ever come back like that.

It was worse than when Sherlock had died.  At least then he hadn’t had to see Sherlock slamming the door in his face, after glaring at him with the same disdain he allowed the rest of the population, every single time he closed his eyes.

-

Days passed.  John remembered to stop trying to call or text Sherlock’s phone after a week. 

Sherlock composed hours of violin solos, and then began to write simple piano accompaniments for them. 

John lived on tea and a few biscuits, courtesy of Mrs Hudson, in the afternoons, and kept his mug full of coffee the rest of the day in an attempt to fend off sleep as long as possible. 

Sherlock’s flat developed the mess that always had characterized Sherlock’s place of living.  Papers scattered on tables, and newspapers spread open and pulled apart and piled in haphazard ways that gave no concern to the date.  Rosin for his bow left on the desk by the computer mouse.  Cups of tea stacked by the sink until he would decide to be bothered to wash them out.  He was considering hiring a housekeeper to come by once or twice a week, except he seriously doubted their ability to not make a mess of his very complex organizational systems.

John’s bed went unused, though Mrs Hudson continued to change the sheets on Wednesdays.  Mrs Hudson pretended to not notice that any meals she prepared for him went untouched, or that more often than not he would barely touch his tea.

Anyone who paid attention for a moment would agree that it was worse than when Sherlock had died.  Because this time, he refused to talk to Ella, to do drinks with Greg, to sit for tea with Mrs Hudson.  He just – shut down.

-

Mycroft paid his first visit to Sherlock’s flat two weeks after the man had slammed the door on John.  Two quick raps on the door, and then he just let himself in.

Sherlock was lying on the sofa.  It took Mycroft a matter of seconds to decide that he was most assuredly high, and it took him less than a minute to find the drugs in the leather case he had always kept them in.  It was tucked amongst the piles of books and papers on the coffee table, this time.

Mycroft barely had the thing between his fingers before Sherlock noticed him.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he demanded, bolting upright.

Mycroft blinked at the language, and then tucked the leather case into his pocket.  “I might ask you the same.”

Sherlock glared daggers that could kill.

“You’ve been clean for seven years, Sherlock.  What.  Happened.”

“I got bored.”

“You’ve been bored before, and survived without resorting to this.”

“Then maybe it’s just the fact that you won’t all leave me alone!” he snapped.

Mycroft sighed.  “Find a new hobby, then.  Clearly the piano isn’t enough of a distraction.”

Sherlock curled back up on the sofa, and turned his back to Mycroft.  His brother was wrong; he hadn’t been clean for seven years.  He had slipped up just the once, four years ago.  But the man who had found him then hadn’t shouted at him about irresponsibility, and disappointment, no.  He had – been worried.  Sherlock couldn’t remember much more about it, but he knew that much.  And when Sherlock had asked him why, why wasn’t he angry or disappointed, the man had said that he was; he was disappointed, at least a little, and maybe a little angry, too, but he knew that showing his disappointment and anger and shouting at Sherlock wasn’t going to help anything, wasn’t going to stop him using in the future.  So he had given Sherlock some paracetamol for the crash that was going to come, and then put him to bed and waited to see what would happen.

Sherlock clenched his fist and pressed a nail into the leather of the sofa.  Whoever that man had been, he wasn’t here now to save him from his brother.

“Can I trust you to keep yourself clean this time?  Or do I need to find someone to stay with you at all times?” Mycroft was asking.

“Stupid question,” Sherlock muttered.  “You never trust me.”

“And with good reason.”  He stepped towards Sherlock and placed two fingers at his neck.  “You’re going to be fine,” he said after a moment.  “But I do expect you to stop.  I don’t care how it happens, but it needs to.  You’ve several people who are going to be rather disappointed.”

“People don’t get disappointed unless they’ve got expectations,” Sherlock said.  “And they can’t have any expectations unless they’ve actually met me, and if they have, then they should be surprised I don’t do this more often.”

The last syllable lingered in the room.  Mycroft watched his younger brother’s shoulders rise and fall ever so slightly, never being relieved of any amount of tension.  He counted to fifty, and then left, and directed his driver to Baker Street.

-

“He’s -”

“Using, yes,” Mycroft repeated.

John dropped his head to stare at the floor.  He’d only seen Sherlock high once before, and he trusted that Sherlock had been clean since then.  It was his own fault Sherlock was using now, it had to be, that was the only thing that had changed.  Sherlock had reverted back to the life he had been living before he met John.

John nodded once, and then reached for his coat.  “Lock the door behind you,” he said, and then he walked out to the street to take a cab to Sherlock’s flat.

-

The door was still unlocked from Mycroft’s earlier visit.  But John still knocked.  Twice.

“Sherlock?” he was about to call when the door was whisked open.

Sherlock glanced him over quickly.  “I’ll make this simple.  Fuck off.”

John closed his eyes and reminded himself to breathe slowly.  In for four, out for seven, and then he looked at Sherlock again.  “Please, just – hear me out.”

He counted the seconds.  At least Sherlock wasn’t slamming the door in his face.  Yet.

“Let me – let me prove it to you,” John said.  “We lived together for four years.  I have proof.  At the – at our flat.”

Sherlock almost smirked.  The man was desperate, and transparent.  But he couldn’t go any further with his newest experiment (which he wasn't even certain would be a sufficient substitute for the drugs) until the reaction had come to completion, and that would take five minutes, at least, and so he didn’t close the door. 

“I hardly know you, I’m not coming with you back to your flat,” Sherlock said instead.

John reached into his pocket for his phone.  “Here, then,” he said, and held it out to Sherlock.  “Don’t tell me those are fake.”

Sherlock scrolled through the photos John was offering up.  Photos of the two of them at a bar, as a couple, obviously.

“It was for a case,” John said.  “You suspected something was going on at the bar behind the scenes or something, so we went undercover.  It was last March.”

Sherlock handed the phone back with a dismissive sigh.  “I don’t know how you got those pictures, but I have no recollection of any such events.”

John could only look back at Sherlock in disbelief.  Photographs, evidence that would hold up in a courtroom, and he was just saying no to them?

“You have two minutes,” Sherlock said.  “To give me something more substantial than that.”

“I – _photographs_?  That isn’t substantial enough for you?”

“Any idiot can pay someone for a few photoshopped files.”

John closed his eyes and licked his lips.  “What about everything at our flat, then?”

“What about it?  One minute fifty two.”

“Your violin.  I have your violin there, on the table by the window, because you play when you’re bored, and half the time it’s not even playing, just you messing about with the strings.  And your books, there’s dozens of science journals and textbooks on the bookcases and in the kitchen.  And you’ve got a microscope in the kitchen and you keep body parts in the fridge in the name of science because a woman from the morgue at Bart’s likes you enough to let you bring them home.”

One second passed as John paused to breathe, and then two, and then three.  John almost dared to hope Sherlock was convinced, before –

“One minute twelve.”

John clenched his fist at his side.  “We met at Bart’s Hospital, at the lab, through a mutual friend, Mike Stamford, because we both needed a flatshare.  You knew everything about me as soon as I walked in, and we moved in together the next day, and you went off chasing a serial killer and you took me with you and you made my limp go away and I blogged about your cases and how brilliantly you solved them and we did that, we just did that for two years until Moriarty came along and made you jump off the roof of Bart’s Hospital unless you wanted his sniper to shoot me, so you jumped but you faked it because you never lose, not to anyone, and then two years later you came back and even though I had gotten myself engaged with some other woman you just let me help you on cases again and when the marriage didn’t work out you were there for me and I moved back in with you and – it was the best thing to ever happen to me.”

Silence fell.  Six seconds, seven, eight.

“Well,” Sherlock finally said.  “I’m sure you’ll be able to move on again.  Perhaps this time you can understand that I truly do hope to never see you again.”  Sherlock’s gaze scanned John from head to toe, and then the door was closed once again.

John stared at the number on the door until it blurred behind tears.

A step away, Sherlock’s head was resting on his arm against the solid oak door, and he was berating himself for not being able to forget every last trace of the idiot doctor, whom he had no more reason to care about than he did the woman he had seen walking past his building earlier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not going to go terribly in-depth with John and Mary's relationship here; all you need to know is that they were married a short time before splitting up (for reasons that you can make up for yourself if you like) at some point in the canon timeline between tsot and hlv, which is where this fic's timeline diverges from the canon. A month or two after their separating, John and Sherlock officially got together, and a little less than a year after that, this fic begins. I tried to do my best with keeping the number of years John and Sherlock knew each other, etc, fairly accurate; apologies if I failed to do so, please bear with me.
> 
> As always, feel free to comment/point out errors/etc freely.


	3. the subconscious knows better

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bits of Sherlock's life with John force their ways through the cracks, but he isn't going to accept them easily.

Days turned into weeks turned into months.  Two and a half of them, actually.  Two and a half months of John trying his best to move on, as Sherlock had so kindly requested, and of Sherlock doing his best to ignore the little flickers of John Watson that continued to crop up in his mind palace, and of everyone who had known the both of them as one entity hoping and waiting and, in some cases, praying.

-

Lestrade’s team found itself staring at a dead philanthropist in a run-down flat on the outskirts of London at two in the afternoon one Monday.

“Will you come?” Greg asked Sherlock over the phone, after relaying this information.

“Of course,” Sherlock said, and then hung up.  He sounded excited, though that was just how he was with a good murder.

“Right, then,” Greg announced to his team.  “Sherlock’s on his way.  And, no, John will not be with him,” he added before Sergeant Donovan could ask.  “He’s still…”  He waved one hand aimlessly in lieu of finding a word for Sherlock’s current state of mind, and then went to make sure the new kid was taping things off correctly downstairs.

-

Sherlock was his normal – perhaps former? – acerbic self.  Within two minutes of his arrival, the student who had found the dead man was in tears, and the now widow was fighting a very strong urge to slap the consultant detective.  She did not only because Sally Donovan had guided her to a Sherlock-free area for coffee and a few more questions.

Lestrade showed Sherlock to the room and made everyone else to step back, and for all its worth, the DI wondered if he hadn’t found a time machine.  It had been years since he’d had Sherlock alone at a crime scene.

“Anything?” he asked as Sherlock scrutinized the view from the window for the fourth time.

Sherlock flipped the lock on the window back and forth three times, and then moved on to the next window.  “Alcoholic, enjoys paying for sex on a regular basis with his wife’s blessing, about to close a very important deal with a larger firm.”

Lestrade nodded, and waved at hand at someone to write it down.  He had long since learnt to stop questioning Sherlock’s ability to be completely right.

“John, what do you think?”

Lestrade – and everyone else in the room – looked up.  Sherlock was looking over the body one more time.  “Sorry?” Lestrade asked after a tangible silence.

“I _said_ , what do you think?” Sherlock repeated, standing up and pulling his latex gloves off.  “I assume you are capable of forming opinions on even moderately complex homicides?”

Lestrade sighed.  “Right.  Um, obvious motive would be money.  Or the deal you said he was closing, I guess.”

Sherlock shoved his hands in his pockets.  “No.  It was his daughter.  Find her, find the killer,” he said and headed out.

“Wha- _daughter_?  He hasn’t got a daughter, we already asked his wife.  No kids.”

Sherlock turned back for half a second to explain himself more clearly.  “He has more than a dozen pictures on his phone of a girl, she’s nineteen in the most recent and she has his nose and eye colour.  Ergo, daughter.  He was dying, inoperable tumour, hence closing the deal all of a sudden, she was pissed about not being included in his will.  I trust you can manage the rest yourself,” he finished, and then he left.

“Right,” Lestrade said after Sherlock’s cab had cleared the street.  “We’re looking for a nineteen year old girl, then.”

-

_Thump, clunk.  Thump, clunk.  Thump, clunk._

Sherlock tossed the squash ball down at the floor for it to rebound back from the window as the night settled over London.  He was perfectly aware of what he had said at the crime scene earlier.  ‘John, what do you think?’

There was a John Fitzsimmons at New Scotland Yard.  Drugs division.  He and Sherlock had been well acquainted for a period of time several years back.  But there was no reason to be thinking of him at a homicide investigation.

Besides, the first John to come to mind was the doctor who had kept pestering him after he woke from his coma.  But that made even less sense than John Fitzsimmons; there was even less reason to be thinking of some clinic-employed doctor at a homicide investigation.

“Damn it,” he muttered.  Sherlock stood, tossed the ball at the sofa, made tea with no intention of drinking it, and went to bed early.  The sleeping pills he took didn’t hurt anything, either.

-

At eight o’clock in the evening, John’s phone rang.  Twelve seconds later, John was on the floor between the sofa and the coffee table and was blindly reaching for his phone.

“Mm- yeah?” John answered the call and rubbed his face with his free hand.

“John, it’s Greg.”

John pulled himself to a sitting position on the floor and leaned against the sofa.  “Yeah, Greg, hi,” he said after he managed to place the name.

“You all right over there?”

“Yeah, fine, just – fell asleep.”

“Sorry, I can call back later if this isn’t a -”

John cleared his throat.  “No, it’s fine.  Fine.”

“…right,” Greg said after a minute.  “Um, there was a case today.  We – well, I – called Sherlock in.”

John sighed.  “Look, I know I used to go to those, but that was only because Sherlock -”

“No, I know.  I’m not calling about that.  It’s just, he mentioned you.  Sort of.  I thought you should know.”

“Oh.  Oh.  That’s… good, maybe?”

“I don’t know.  It was like he didn’t even notice he’d said it, though.  He was looking over the body and he said, ‘John, what do you think?’ but when I asked what he said he was all annoyed about being asked to repeat himself and said, ‘I said, what do you think?’ and then sort of insulted my department’s ability to handle a homicide,” Lestrade explained.

There was silence for a moment, and then a dry laugh on John’s end.  “Well.  That last bit sounds like him.”

“I think you should keep trying with him,” Lestrade decided.  “To – spark a memory or something.  There’s got to be at least some part of him that still remembers you.”

“He’s made his view on that pretty clear.”

Greg sighed.  “Yeah, I know, just…  I’m sorry, mate.  My wife and I split up ages ago, but still.  I can’t imagine what it’d be like for her to not acknowledge me when we pass in a shop or something.”

John was silent for a minute, and then said, “Greg?”

“Yeah?”

“…I think I’ll take you up on those drinks.”

-

John woke up with the worst hangover he’d had in a long time the next morning, but even as he was stumbling into the bathroom in search of paracetamol, he felt better than he had in a long time.

-

Sherlock woke at four in the morning with a start.  He blinked several times and squinted at the periodic table hanging on the wall across from him and grasped at wisps of ideas for what it was that had woken him.

Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon…  He was at radon before he could recall an image of a man.  He couldn’t remember what the man had done, or what he thought the man had done, but he could identify the man as Doctor John Watson, and that in itself was enough to irk him to no end.

Sherlock spent the day titrating various solutions of blood in water, to determine how little blood was needed for the indicator to be activated.  He told himself it was because this was useful information, but really it was information that was readily available online, and this was simply a task that could be done mindlessly.

Mindless wasn’t enough.

-

It was raining buckets when Sherlock jabbed the buzzer for 221B Baker Street.

John had managed to stop himself from getting excited every time the bell rang now, because the chance that it actually was Sherlock had been rapidly approaching zero from the start.  Now the only question was, who the hell was visiting at half past eleven on a Tuesday night.

He opened the door and couldn’t quite believe what he saw.

“Sher- Sherlock?”

Sherlock hardly let him get the word out.  “I’ve met you for all of two hours in total and all of that was over a period of time more than two months ago.  You are no-one to me.  There is no reason for me to give a damn about you.  Now please do explain to me why the fuck I can’t forget you completely.”

John thought he might cry, and he wasn’t sure if it was because Sherlock was actually standing there before him, or because Sherlock was still so desperate to forget him altogether.

“We – we were together, Sherlock, I swear we were, and we were the best thing to happen to each other, and – I don’t know why you can’t remember that, I wish you could, but – there’s some part of you that knows that.  There’s some part of you that knows what I meant to you at one point, that must be it.”  John didn’t bother trying to stop his voice from breaking now; Sherlock, this Sherlock, knew how he felt about this whole ordeal, and there was no point in trying to hide that.

Sherlock only shook his head, though, and raindrops flew from his matted curls.  “No, that isn’t me.  I wouldn’t have had that with anyone, I don’t go in for sentiment.”

“You – you said that, when we met, you said you were married to your work, but you still – we still did have that, Sherlock, I swear we did.”

The words dripped from the building and from Sherlock’s curls and from the streetlights with the rain.  And Sherlock and John just stood there for a moment; Sherlock because he was desperate to be able to read something else, anything else, on this man in front of him, and John because he wasn’t sure he should allow himself to hope this could possibly end well.

Thunder clapped, and lightning lit the street behind Sherlock.

“Will you at least come inside?” John finally asked.  “To get out of the rain, if nothing else?”

Sherlock looked down at John’s feet and then at the doorstep he was standing on, considered his very limited options, and then nodded once, and quickly.  John stepped aside and pulled the door open, and Sherlock took two steps into the building, just enough that the door could be closed behind him.

“I’ll get you a towel,” John said, realizing just how completely soaked Sherlock was.  He must have walked from his flat, John decided, and then he wondered just how irked Sherlock had to be to walk an hour in the pouring rain to some – stranger’s – flat.

John started up the stairs, and considered saying something when Sherlock didn’t follow right away, but decided against it and went up to the flat alone.

Sherlock was busy taking in every detail of the ground floor, from the wallpaper to the vanilla candle that had recently been burning in the kitchen down the hall.  If any of it seemed the least bit familiar, it was because he and Mrs Hudson were on good terms, and so of course she had invited him in on more than one occasion before.  That was all, Sherlock told himself, and so whatever thing it was tapping at the back door of his mind palace was nothing at all.  He repeated this twice in his head, and once under his breath, and then took the stairs up one at a time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sure how I feel about ending this chapter where I did; it was getting a little long and I needed to get it posted, so there it is for you all.


	4. memories we can never escape

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock and John are both still trying to adjust to their individual lives. Maybe none of this will be as easy as they want it to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Christmas Eve everyone! And yes, this is very late, but I have been hunting and then I had finals and life gets very busy very quickly... Anyway, here you go. I have the remaining chapters sketched out now, so we'll see if I can't write them a bit quicker.

John stepped back out into the hall with a towel in one hand to see Sherlock stepping into the sitting room, at least somewhat unsure of himself.  John followed him in and for a moment, just watched him as he turned slowly and surveyed the room.  The two chairs, the sofa, the skull on the mantle, the impeccably clean kitchen.

A draft came from somewhere – Mrs Hudson getting up for a glass of water and closing doors on her way, probably – and Sherlock shivered involuntarily.

John cleared his throat and stepped forward.  “Here,” he said, and offered the towel.

Sherlock nodded once and wrapped his hands in the towel for a moment before drying his hair as best he could and then wrapping it over his shoulders and holding it close with one hand.  The other hand, he used to examine the contents of the flat.  John contented himself to stand just inside the room and watch.  It was nice, in a way, to see Sherlock back in their flat, but that didn’t mean John would have preferred to know that Sherlock was there by choice and because he wanted to be and because he had missed John as much as John had missed him.

Sherlock made his way around the room slowly, leaving nothing unturned.  He started at the mantle, the focal point of the room, and turned the skull over in his hand.  It wasn’t clear if he was deducing the life of the person who it had once been a part of, or if he was wondering why his skull was in this man’s flat. 

It was the same for the books as he ran his fingers down their spines and scanned the titles, and pulled one or two from the shelf to flip through the pages briefly and skim the notes that were penned in the margins in his handwriting, and for the violin when he plucked its strings lightly and ran his thumb along the dark wood of the bow from frog to tip, and for the pack of cigarettes he found tucked under the lip of the table between the windows.

He recognized these things; he knew he did, and John knew he did.  He knew that those books had been his and that it was his violin there and that the skull belonged to him and that he had put the cigarettes there at one point because that was what he did.  What he couldn’t quite grasp was why his things were all sitting _here_ , in this flat, and not his own.

Perhaps Mycroft was simply playing tricks on him.  He wouldn’t put it past him; his brother had always enjoyed allowing himself an occasional moment of naïveté.

Sherlock pulled one of the curtains to the side and peered out the window.  “Damn,” he breathed.  The rain had not let up, nor did it show any signs of doing so in the near future.  And his wallet – and fifty quid and an Oyster Card and anything else that might be remotely useful in finding his way back – was in his coat.  Which was hanging on the back of the door at his flat.

Thunder clapped; the storm was moving away, at least, even if at a painfully slow rate.  He turned back to the man who had remained silent at the edge of this room for the last two hours.  He was already pulling the towel from his shoulders and bracing himself for the cold and wet again when John swallowed the lump in his throat that he had long since labelled as longing.  “It’s – the storm’s not letting up anytime soon, and I’ve got – there’s your, er, there are clothes that’ll fit you, in the wardrobe, and you can shower and get some sleep,” John said, and shrugged after a moment.  “Your place will still be there in the morning.”

Sherlock counted to three before he nodded brusquely.  He didn’t need time to consider his options, but neither did he want to give the man false hope in appearing too eager to spend the night.

“The towels are in the bottom cabinet in the bathroom,” John provided after another moment.  He stepped to the side when Sherlock walked past him, and he watched him walk to the bathroom at the end of the hall and close the door behind him, and then he sighed, and went to bed upstairs.

-

Sherlock took his time in the shower.  He memorized the pattern of the tiles while he massaged shampoo into his hair, and recited the periodic table while he ran a soapy washcloth over himself.

It didn’t make sense that his things were here.  It didn’t make sense that this man was insisting that they had been together, as a couple.  It didn’t make sense that there was any amount of evidence to support his statement if Sherlock couldn’t remember a single moment of it.

But which was more likely?  That he had once had a relationship with this man, as indicated by the tangible proof in this flat, but had inexplicably forgotten every moment of it?  Or that this man had convinced someone – Mycroft, perhaps, or some other willing participant – to help him to put all of the physical evidence into place so that he might make Sherlock think he was forgetting some major part of his life that had never actually, in fact, happened?

Sherlock dried himself and changed into pyjamas he found in the bedroom at the end of the hall – pyjamas that did fit him, and did otherwise appear to actually belong to him, even if he could not remember owning this exact pair – and he forced himself to stop _thinking_ quite so much, at least for a moment, and he allowed himself to fall asleep in a bed that had conformed to his body on one side.

-

John went downstairs the next morning to find Sherlock’s bed made.  There was no sign that the man had been there at all the night before, save for a second towel hanging in the bathroom.

-

Sherlock spent that day at the hospital.  He placed a request to see his own medical files, both from his coma and from everything prior to that incident.  He was given access to a room, because someone owed him a favor, and he clipped up his MRI scans on the lightboxes in chronological order, and he set to work.  His work consisted of scrutinizing the images for any differences which might account for the discrepancies between his memory of his life, and everyone else’s.

He spent six hours staring at the images, leaving only when a doctor came in to say they were sorry but they needed the room back.

He found nothing.

-

Another day passed.  And then another, and another, and still another.  The days morphed into months without anyone’s notice.  Sherlock stayed at his flat, and John, at his.  John still had to correct himself when he was thinking about going back home to their flat – _no,_ my _flat; Sherlock isn’t living there anymore_.

A case brought Sherlock back to that area of London, and he stopped at Mrs Hudson’s café after he had seen the idiot murderer handcuffed and put in the back of a police car.

“Sherlock, dear.” She greeted him with a smile.  Though, it did not take much for him to see that it wasn’t completely genuine.  “What brings you here?”

“London’s criminal population,” he said, returning the smile.  He surveyed the pastries on display.  “Anything good?”

“Oh, you go and sit, I’ll fix you something.  Coffee, is it?”

He nodded.  “Black, two sugars.”  She stepped back behind the counter, and he took a seat at an open booth in the corner.

Sherlock skimmed through the latest news stories on his phone, and Mrs Hudson brought him a plate of pastries and a coffee and respected his disinterest in idle chat.

Sherlock sat there for half an hour after he finished his coffee, and the pastries, and he folded his hands and stared at the wall.  Then he stood, left a five pound note at his table, and exited the shop.

As soon as he reached the door of the flat directly next to the shop, he stopped, and turned, and took two breaths, and pressed the buzzer.

-

Thirty-seven seconds.  That was how long it took John Watson to answer the door, and then that was how long he stared at Sherlock, trying to figure out why the man was standing there before him, before he spoke.

“Sherlock,” he said.

Sherlock nodded.  “John.”

John rubbed at the back of his neck.  “Um, do you -”

“Prove that you knew me,” Sherlock interrupted.

John blinked.  “What?  I – I did, I showed you those photos, and you saw everything that’s upstairs in – the flat, and…”

Sherlock sighed and closed his eyes.  “No, I need to know that you knew me, that this isn’t all some stupid elaborate trick, that my brother didn’t just tell you about me and give you my things to keep in your flat and -”  He cut himself off and rubbed his eyes and then looked at John.  “Please.”

John nodded after a moment.  “Yeah, okay, just – inside, maybe?”  He opened the door the rest of the way and watched Sherlock step inside, and then he closed the door.

They looked at each other for a minute, or maybe longer.  Sherlock was tired of not being able to forget John.  John was still clinging to the thread of hope that Sherlock would remember him.

“I know that you sleep with your socks on,” John finally said.  Quietly, as though allowing anyone else to hear might destroy any fragment of John that had remained intact within Sherlock’s mind.  “I know that you like composing in A minor because there aren’t any sharps or flats and you prefer minor to major, and that you shave twice a day even though you don’t need to.”

John was watching Sherlock for a reaction as he said this.  Sherlock only closed his eyes and kept his face blank.

“You use generous amounts of fabric softener when you can actually be bothered to do your own laundry, and you like using vanilla-scented shampoo but you would never dare say so, or buy it yourself.  You can’t stand it when you have dirt under your nails, which is why you always have latex gloves for crime scenes but you never wear the protective suit over your clothes.  You hate hats because of what they do to your hair.  And no matter how you fall asleep, you’re curled up on your side in the morning.”

John said nothing more to break the silence; he only watched Sherlock’s face and prayed for something other than him walking out again.

“Okay,” Sherlock finally said, almost too softly to hear.  He opened his eyes and licked his lips.  “Okay,” he repeated.  “I – I’m sorry, I don’t – I don’t remember you.  But I do believe you.”

John allowed himself to exhale fully, and he nodded.  Another moment passed, just the two of them studying each other, and then John asked, hesitantly, “Will you move back in?”

Sherlock nodded once.


	5. forget about the stupid little things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock moves back to Baker Street and begins to attempt to adjust to this life of his, this life with John Watson.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay i apologise very much for not updating this much sooner; also i am taking a creative writing class this semester and classes start this week and so i have no idea how much time that's going to require, but i will do my best to set aside time to write this, especially since i've gone and planned out the remaining chapters now. enjoy.

It had been three days since Sherlock had a few boxes of his possessions moved from his Kensington flat to his room at 221B Baker Street.  John woke two minutes before his alarm blared, and this number was burned into his mind.  Three days.  Four now.  He was living with a stranger.

They both were.

John silenced the alarm before it made a sound, showered quickly, and went downstairs for tea and toast.

Sherlock was raiding the kitchen cabinets in search of – something.  He had completely emptied one of them, and now assorted packets of tea and half a loaf of bread and two half-empty jars of honey sat on the counter in a mess of an arrangement.  Sherlock himself was on his tiptoes, trying to get a better look at the top shelf.

John’s presence went unnoticed, until he cleared his throat and said, “Need something?”

Sherlock startled, subtly, and turned.  “Um,” he started, “coffee?”

“Above the stove.”  John watched Sherlock nod once, turn, and retrieve the canister from its usual spot.  “I’m off to work, then,” he added once Sherlock was well off on pouring water into the percolator.  He didn’t mention that there was a French press stored next to the coffee that Sherlock had usually used in the mornings.

Sherlock only nodded.  He wasn’t listening.  He didn’t care that John was going to work, he didn’t care that John was forgoing breakfast and morning tea in order to get out of the flat more quickly, in order to be able to clear his mind and to remind himself that it wasn’t Sherlock’s fault, or his own fault, or anyone’s fault, that he hadn’t known where the coffee was kept.

John made a mental note to add coffee to the shopping list when he heard the hollow _clang_ of a nearly empty canister replaced on the counter, and then he left.

-

Sherlock spent this day as he had the previous three: attempting to deduce what he had been like, what differed between himself and the Sherlock that John Watson had loved.  Perhaps if he deduced enough, if he forced enough details into his mind, he would remember something.

He sat at the kitchen table, staring at the microscope, at the box of prepared slides, at the row of test tubes filled with varying colours of solutions.  Those test tubes were from a time when he had been attempting to determine exactly what concentration of ammonia was needed to obtain the particular shade of stain that had been found on a dead woman’s handbag.  This, he knew only because of a Molskine notebook that was resting face-down, open to the pages that corresponded to that experiment.  The rest of the notebook was full of his handwriting, his scrawled notes, his hurried calculations, and his ideas which had to be put off until later when he had more time, or when he could obtain the proper equipment.

This was what he knew that ‘John’s Sherlock’ was: a consulting detective.  A genius.  A smoker who more frequently limited himself to nicotine patches at the urging of others.  An experimental scientist, and more usually, chemist or biologist in that regard.  An occasional cook in the kitchen.  A musician – violinist and composer.  A lover, apparently, and boyfriend.  Someone who took his coffee black with sugar and his tea milky.  A man who kept himself closed off for the most part.  Someone who kept things to himself for the sake of spared feelings. (This last he had learnt through trial and error; he had told the landlady, Mrs Hudson, that her sister did not in fact appreciate her visits and had sent the gift only in the hopes that it would spare her from a future visit. Both John Watson and Mrs Hudson had been stunned into silence momentarily, before the latter, at a loss for words, stormed back into her own flat.)

This was what he did not know about ‘John’s Sherlock’: why did he spare feelings?  Who did he care for – the landlady, apparently, and John himself, obviously; but why?  Did John know about his past with drugs, and if so, how much did he know?  What was his standing with those at Scotland Yard; better or worse than he knew it to be?  Why did he love John Watson?  Why was he in love with John Watson?

These questions dug away at him, carved for themselves niches within a recently added portion of his mind palace.  Would have driven him to smoke, if he had not seen John dispose of the cigarettes from their hiding places during cleaning yesterday evening.

As it was, he was reaching for the box of nicotine patches from the top shelf of the bookcase, behind several volumes on Nikola Tesla, when Mrs Hudson knocked lightly at the door and stepped in with a tea tray, and then announced it as such.

“Bit early for you to be up, then, Sherlock,” she chittered on, fussing about with the tea.

Sherlock sighed and stepped down from the chair which he had been standing on.  “Hardly see why it matters at what time I get out of bed,” he muttered.  He did take the cup of tea she offered, and he sipped at it, and he pulled a slight face – she’d still not learnt that he didn’t like it this sweet.

But he _had_ , he had once taken his tea that sweet, that was the only explanation.  And that irked him.  His tastes couldn’t have been so different simply because of who he was living with, or where he was living.  So he forced a smile and entertained her small talk and waited for her to return downstairs, which she did, in due time.

-

Sherlock was still in the contemplation phase of composing when John returned home to the silent flat.  John took off his coat, sorted through the mail and dropped it on the side table, and sat down in his chair with a newspaper, and still Sherlock did not acknowledge him.  But that was not unusual; it never had been.  Once, John had left for a four-day medical conference – and he distinctly remembered how he had very explicitly explained this to Sherlock – and still, Sherlock had called him two days later to demand, “Where are you? We’re out of beans.”  And then when John had returned home and called to Sherlock’s closed door that he was home, it was another ten hours before Sherlock noticed his reappearance.

John almost smiled at this memory.  Almost.

And then Sherlock picked up his violin and adjusted the tension on the strings and lifted his bow and began to play, and then John did allow himself to close his eyes for a moment, and pretend that everything was normal again.

-

Days passed.  Days of… well, of relative normalcy.  Sherlock was learning his way around the flat.  John was working to learn where their boundaries were.  But, altogether, things were going smoothly.

Perhaps that should have been the indication of what was to come.

-

“No, I can’t do this.”

John looked up from his paperback thriller.  “What?”

“I can’t – I can’t do this.”  Sherlock was pacing, clenching and unclenching one hand, tension oozing from his pores.

“Can’t do what?” John asked.

“ _This_ ,” Sherlock hissed.  He waved one hand wildly to indicate the entirety of the flat.  “It’s hardly my fault I don’t know where the hell you keep the sugar or the bar soap or why there’s some stupid bioluminescent mess in the fridge!”

John stood.  Slowly, and carefully.  “Sherlock, you’re just riling yourself now, you just need -”

But Sherlock wasn’t going to hear any of that.  “I just need to stop?  To calm down, to sleep, perhaps?  A fucking _nap_ isn’t going to help anything!”

Sherlock was nearly shouting now.  John cringed and allowed himself a moment to pray that Mrs Hudson hadn’t been trying to sleep.

“No.  No, I’m not -”  Sherlock cut himself off and shook his head.  “No.”  He tore his coat from the hook on the back of the door.  John didn’t have time to say a single word before Sherlock was down the stairs.  “Don’t wait up,” he spat at the last step before he slammed the door behind him.

John let the sound finish reverberating through the building before he sank back onto his chair, novel still in one hand.  He reread the same sentence eight times, never once comprehending the meaning.

“Are you two not getting on, then?” came the timid question from the door.

John looked up.  “Oh, um.”  He shook his head.  “Sorry about that, he…”  He sighed and rubbed at his leg.  “Needs some air.”

Mrs Hudson nodded.  “It’s late, dear, you should be to bed soon.  Didn’t you say you were going in early tomorrow?”

“Oh.  Right, yes.”

But John made no move to go upstairs, and Mrs Hudson was already putting the kettle on.

-

Sherlock, having chosen to march himself the few miles to his flat, rather than sit fuming in a suffocating cab for two minutes, went crashing into his flat at one twenty-seven in the morning.  He slammed the door behind him and threw the deadbolt with as much force as he had closed the door at Baker Street.  After all – he didn’t give a rat’s arse if anyone else in the building might be trying to sleep.  Why should he?

He threw his coat down onto a chair, jabbed at the buttons of the stereo until there was at last _noise_ to fill the flat, and nearly broke a mug in the process of making coffee that would sit on the table in front of him and cool to the point of actually being _cold_ before he so much as tasted it (and promptly spat it back out and dumped it down the drain).

Three a.m. found him leaning against one of the windows, palm flat to the glass beside his face.  His eyes focused on the tiny clouds of breath that fogged the glass, then retreated, and then swelled again with his next exhale.  Subconsciously, he was counting the cars that drove by down on the street – traffic was six percent higher than the average for this time of night.

The sky began to warm to a lovely violent, and then to a pink, and the sun peeked over the tops of the buildings just as Sherlock was beginning to lose consciousness.

“ _Merde_ ,” he sighed. 

He pushed himself up off the glass, watched the light reflect from the glimmering buildings that composed this city for just a moment, and then let the heavy curtains fall into place and went to bed.

-

John did not sleep well that night.  Or the next.  Or the next after that.  And it was on this third day that Greg stopped by with a few thin files – cold cases.  “I heard he’d moved back in,” Greg said after the tea had been served.  “Thought it might help, having something to occupy him.”

To this, John only nodded.  “Yeah.  I’ll – pass them along when he comes back.”

Greg frowned.  “What, did he leave again?”

“He threw a fit about ‘not being able to do this’ and stormed off somewhere.  Back to his old flat, probably.”  He shrugged.  “It’s better than some places.”

“I’m sure he’ll be back.  He’s stubborn.  Just needs some time to adjust and all.”

John nodded again, even though he wasn’t sure Greg was right about this.  For now, he’d just have to wait, seeing as house calls had never caused anything but further arguments as of yet.

Greg left, at some point shortly thereafter, and John left his tea to cool and went out to do some hours at the clinic.  Even if he was meant to have off today.

-

John did not return back from the clinic until well after Mrs Hudson had left half a casserole on the table in their kitchen for dinner.  Sherlock was lounging on the sofa with a book in hand and his cleared dinner plate on the floor beside him.

As though nothing had happened.

John was nearly ready to punch the man for that alone.  He refrained from doing so, and instead focused his attention on transferring the cooled dinner into a plastic container and placing it in the fridge, behind the milk and away from the unidentified science experiments.  He made a mental note to clean the fridge out tomorrow.

He turned back to the living room and cleared his throat.  “You’re back, then.”

Sherlock nodded.  Didn’t even look up from his book.

John sighed, and went to bed.


	6. the things we do for the ones we know

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock takes on a case again; John appreciates this step towards normalcy, but all of this doesn't bode well for John himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for hostage-type situation; nothing is described in great detail, but there is a kidnapping and they are not nice people.

John returned home from work the next day to find Sherlock in the same position he had been in that morning: cross-legged on the floor in front of the sofa, papers scattered about himself and photographs and maps pinned to the wall.

“Have you gotten anywhere, then?” John asked.

Sherlock did not reply.  John wasn’t surprised by this.  After all, he’d rather see Sherlock silent and staring at case files than vocal and slamming doors on the way out of their flat.

At least _this_ , this silence, was closer to normalcy.

-

John brewed and consumed three cups of tea that evening, as well as half a bowl of beef stew.  There was a bowl placed at Sherlock’s side and a cup of tea as well, but neither had been touched in those three hours since.  And now, John was sat in his chair, and was reading.  Reading, and watching Sherlock, and smiling.

-

John went to bed at eleven sharp.  He fell asleep at eleven-seventeen, and he dreamed of warmth.

Sherlock did not close his eyes for more than the time it took to blink.  He made half a dozen phone calls in the night, rearranged the papers and maps and photographs no less than thirteen times, and dashed out of the flat at four in the morning for something that needed to be done in person – a tobacco shop whose merchandise he needed to check.  To confirm his latest lead, of course; nothing else.

When Sherlock returned at seven, the flat was empty.  The kettle was just boiling, and the tea was set to be brewed, and John’s jacket was on a chair.  And John himself was nowhere to be seen.

Sherlock frowned for a moment, and then returned to the living room.  He reconsidered the photographs on the wall, tore two down and cast them aside, and resumed his previous web of thought.  No, of course he had been stupid to believe that the executioners were using that tobacco shop as a means of communication.  Of course.

-

The phone call came at two o’clock the next morning.  Sherlock had hardly moved in those fifteen hours, and he accepted the call from the withheld number without hesitation.

“Sherlock Holmes,” he said.

“Drop the case.”  The voice was masculine.  Throaty.  French by birth, and Irish by choice.

Sherlock sighed.  “I’m not in the habit of sitting by and quietly watching men execute their plans to assassinate rising world leaders.”

The voice laughed.  “Britain hardly qualifies itself as the world.”

“Near enough.  I’m sure you’re only waiting for the opportune moment to go global.”

“Oh, of course.  You know our secrets, so anything we might say now is irrelevant.  No point even trying to convince you to keep your lips sealed in front of the authorities, or your friends at Scotland Yard.”

“I don’t have friends,” Sherlock was quick to cut in.

“No.”  And there was a pause, and then, “But you do have John Watson.”

Sherlock rubbed his face.  “Whatever you intend to do to him to persuade me, you’ve not done enough research.  He hasn’t been - _that_ to me in months.”

The sound on the other end of the line changed, and after a quiet _click_ as he was put on speakerphone, the man spoke again.  Louder, and more boldly.  “You want us to hurt him, then?”

“No,” Sherlock said quickly.  “No, of course I don’t _want_ you to hurt him.  I wouldn’t want you to hurt anyone else, either.”

“Anti-violence, are we?”

“I don’t approve of using one’s strength to hurt someone weaker than yourself as a means of bargaining.”

“Because you don’t get to lie your way out of this.  If you say you don’t care about him, we hurt him to call your bluff, and you lose.  If you admit you do care about him, we hurt him so that you forget everything you know about us.  We win, you lose, either way.”

Sherlock’s knuckles were white around the phone he held to his ear.  He measured his breaths carefully and considered his options.

Just because the man was practically a stranger didn’t mean he wanted him to suffer on his account.  But – this group, they had killed fifteen people in the last two months alone; he couldn’t let them go.  He couldn’t lie to them, either, apparently.  They had known when he was getting close, they would know if he didn’t drop their case.

Sherlock didn’t have time to consider his options.

“Tell him how much it hurts, Johnny.”  And there was the smack of metal on skin, and a stifled cry of pain.  “You still so indifferent, Mr Holmes?” the man asked.

Sherlock ended the call and returned to his papers with fresh vigor.  He only glanced at the photo they sent him a moment later, of an abused John Watson slumped in a chair, bleeding and bruised.  They had killed men before, and women, and they would not bat an eye to dispose of this man now.

So Sherlock would find them, identify them, end them.  And he would do it quickly.

-

Twenty hours later, the men heading the operation were shoved into police cars, hands cuffed behind their backs.  The law enforcement on the scene discovered quite a bit there – two tablets with all of the plans for murders, past and future, spelled out in crystal clear language; trophies from each of the homicides in the form of dozens of photographs; a contact list with the names of the remaining members of the party.

Not present was a John Watson.

Sherlock spat out deductions about the man who relayed this information until the man was very much ready to break Sherlock’s neck himself.

-

John returned to Baker Street later in the night – or rather, early in the morning.  It was four a.m. when he staggered into the building and let the door swing shut behind him.

Sherlock was down the stairs in a moment.  “John,” he said, somewhere between relieved and incredibly irked.  Sherlock moved to support John before his ankle gave out, and then he - more carried than helped - him up the stairs to deposit the wounded man on the sofa.

“Told them you didn’t care,” John muttered from dry lips, not quite bitter enough to be accusatory.

Sherlock pretended to not hear the words, and handed John a large glass of water and two pills to help with the pain.  He watched John take the pills and empty the glass before he methodically removed John’s clothing and checked him for injuries, for wounds, and attended to each of them in turn.  He worked quickly, and thoroughly, and efficiently.  There was no sentiment in his actions as there had been when John had come home from a bar fight at two a.m. a year ago.

John remained quiet through the procedure; exhaustion was enough to keep him from questioning anything for the moment.

Sherlock fetched pyjamas from John’s room upstairs, and two spare blankets from the cupboard.  He dressed John in the same manner with which he had tended to the injuries and then wrapped him in the blankets and watched him give over to the sleep he had been deprived of the last two nights.

Sherlock finished putting the papers and pictures and maps into their corresponding folders, and then went to bed himself, though not before he had set an alarm for ten-fifteen.  Five hours would be enough.

-

Sherlock woke just a moment before his alarm actually went off.  He promptly silenced it, and, upon remembering why it had been set in the first place, stood and went out to the living room.

John was still sleeping.  He was curled on his side, facing the sofa, taking up as little space as was possible and holding the blankets as close as was possible.

Sherlock filled the kettle to boil (for himself) and retrieved the first aid kit from the bathroom once again (for John).  He gently peeled the blanket back from John’s sleeping form, and went about changing the bandages which needed changing in such a manner that he did not wake the man.  Ice was replaced where it needed replacing, a fresh glass of water and another dose of painkillers were left on the coffee table so as to be readily available whenever John should wake, and the blanket was tucked over him once more.

Sherlock made himself that cup of tea, and returned to his room.  The door, he left open, should John wake and require something further.

 _Sentiment,_ some voice in his head muttered.  _You’re being stupid, Sherlock._

“It’s my fault this happened to him,” Sherlock muttered aloud in response.  “The least I can do is make sure he’s taken care of.”  And, after a moment, he amended this statement, adding, “I’d do the same for anyone else.”

-

Four hours later found Sherlock seated on his bed, a computer open on his knee and the far wall covered with printouts of entries from the blog of John H. Watson.  (It had taken him a good half hour to locate the printer in the storage cupboard upstairs.)

John was still asleep, which was why the bedroom door was still open.  There really was no sense having him know about this; he would only worry, and he did not need to be worrying about anything but himself now.

Thus far, Sherlock had decided that the blog entries could not have been faked.  There were too many details within the posts, and while it was true that only lies had copious layers of detail such as this, many of these details were true, and had been kept private while he had been working the cases which were written about.

Which brought the central problem to light: Sherlock remembered each of these cases, of course, but he remembered them much differently than the manner in which they were described in these blog posts.  He had never worked with anyone in such a way as to call them a partner, for one, but John was nothing but a partner.  And as Sherlock remembered it, he had won the game with the cabbie.  The business at the pool with Moriarty had involved only himself and his handgun, and Moriarty and his snipers, and had been a game of chicken – who would pull the trigger first, who would bolt first?

And his faked suicide – well.  Whatever man Sherlock Holmes had been to fake a suicide in front of his best friend like that, he was a right bastard.  Sherlock didn’t have to be a sentimental idiot himself to know that.  But as far as Sherlock knew now, he had jumped to get out of all the publicity, and to beat Moriarty.  Moriarty was threatening to ruin his reputation completely; no-one would ever trust his word, much less allow him anywhere near a murder scene again.  It was the only solution, to disappear for a few years until he could make himself public again and be taken seriously.

There was a light knock at the open door.  Sherlock startled, and turned.  John stood there, wrapped in one of the blankets still.

“What are you doing?” John asked.  His voice was soft – weak, rather – though the hours of sleep had clearly done him a great deal of good.  He still looked like someone who’d nearly been killed by some madmen with too much time on their hands, but nearer the ‘alive’ end of that spectrum than the ‘dead’.

Sherlock closed the laptop.  “You shouldn’t be walking on that ankle.”

John shrugged his shoulders.

“What do you need?”

He shrugged again.

Sherlock sighed, and then stood.  “Come on, then, I’ll make you some tea.  Probably should eat, too.”  At his urging, John did limp back down the hall and return to his spot on the sofa while Sherlock started the tea.

“Was that my blog?” John asked.

It was Sherlock’s turn to shrug off a question.  “Research,” he said.  He placed a mug of tea in front of John before there was a follow-up inquiry, and then went back to the kitchen to heat up a few bowls of soup for their lunch.

-

John slept away the remainder of the day, after a bowl of soup and another dose of painkillers.  Sherlock called the clinic to say that John would need a few days off, and then moved himself to his armchair to spend some time rereading John’s blog posts and taking moments to study John himself.

-

Sherlock didn’t sleep that night.  He should have; he should have slept at least eighteen hours after spending fifty-three consecutive hours on the assassination conspirators’ case, as was his usual method.  Instead, he had taken a five hour nap and would spend the foreseeable future annoying himself with the way he was failing to remember any of the details from the blog posts.

Perhaps there was something wrong with him.

But, if that were the case… why would John want him to stay?


	7. a blog is worth a thousand words

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’ve been looking at your blog... I think it’d be more useful for you to tell me about the cases yourself. Only if you don’t mind, of course.”
> 
> “Yeah, sure.”

It was four days before John was ready to go back to work.  On the second day, he had managed only a very brief shower, but the hot water had felt wonderful to him even for those few minutes.  On the third, he walked from the sofa to the kitchen a dozen times over the course of the day, all while Sherlock sat in his chair, laptop open on one knee and a book on the other.  Sherlock had continued to tend to John’s bandages and provide ice and painkillers as needed, and had spent a few minutes trying to convince John it was perfectly acceptable to take another day or two off before John had gone and made breakfast himself.  Sherlock stayed put in his chair and did not stop John from leaving the flat at a quarter to eight, though he did phone ahead to the clinic and remind those present that John was to take it easy, for the time being.

He sat there, in the silent flat, for some indeterminate period of time.

He considered his options.

John had recovered; he could manage on his own.  Clearly the man was safer without Sherlock there.  Sherlock could leave.  Probably should, really.  There was no point in staying when he could neither provide for John what John expected – a relationship – nor protect the man from his own dangerous lifestyle.

But John wasn’t angry about what had happened.  He wasn’t even upset about it – at least not in such a way that he was directing the energy at Sherlock himself.  Sherlock knew what it was like to have John be upset at him; he had been upset when Sherlock had refused to look at the cases he had brought to his Kensington flat so many months ago.  He had been upset when Sherlock had returned to Baker Street after storming off a few days prior and did not say a single word about it – Sherlock assumed John hadn’t been aware that Sherlock had indeed noticed the way his strides were slightly longer, his hand held in a firm fist at his side, his posture perfectly straight.

But John was not upset now.  He wasn’t happy about what happened to him, by any means, but he did not blame Sherlock for what happened.

Sherlock could stay, then.  Stay, and not be waiting for the subtle hints that John would drop for him, indicating that Sherlock should leave the flat, and coincidentally, John himself.

-

Sherlock was already in his room, door shut, when John returned from the clinic that evening.

John picked through the fridge for edible leftovers, and went upstairs to bed.

-

Sherlock did not sleep that night.  He kept to his room, yes, but he did not sleep.  Didn’t even lie back on the bed, or change out of his shirt and trousers.  Rather, he spent those nine hours he was in his room staring at the wall.  He wasn’t reading the blog posts he had pinned up there, or even his own notes.  He was just… staring.  Thinking, considering.  And getting decidedly nowhere.

He had been doing that a lot lately.

-

The next day passed as the previous few had: John went to the clinic, and Sherlock stayed at the flat and kept to himself and did little more than stare at the wall and think.

John arrived home after Sherlock had already turned down the food Mrs Hudson had offered for dinner.  Sherlock himself was still stretched out on the sofa, as he had been when John had left that morning.

“Hey,” John said, and took his coat off.

Sherlock did nothing to acknowledge this.

John sighed, and put the water on for tea.  “You eat yet?” he asked.  He didn’t expect an answer, and he knew it himself by the time he finished saying the words; the lack of dishes in the sink spoke volumes.

“Right, then.”

Sherlock continued to lie still, and John made tea and buttered pasta.

“Sherlock,” John tried once more.  When there was still no acknowledgement from the man, John took the tea and plate of food to him, setting it on the coffee table.  “You do need to eat.”

 _Ah._  Sherlock filed away all of this that had happened and sat up.  “I’ve gone far longer than this,” he said.  He took the plate anyway, and had cleared it before his tea had much of a chance to cool.  This opportunity was used to record further details of the man that was John H. Watson: the way he sat, the speed at which he read that day’s paper, the fact that he skipped over the sports section but took great care to check the obituaries.

“John?”

John looked over his shoulder.  “Hm?”

Sherlock hesitated.  He looked at John; he noticed that his hair was more golden-grey than blond in the kitchen lighting.  John swallowed the bite of food he had been in the middle of.

“I’ve been looking at your blog,” Sherlock finally said.

“Oh.  Right, okay.”

“I think it’d be more useful for you to tell me about the cases yourself,” Sherlock finished.  And then added, very quickly,  “Only if you don’t mind, of course.”

John nodded.  “Yeah, sure.”

-

An hour later, they were both on the sofa.  Both sitting up properly, too.  Sherlock had a computer – his own; he had been careful to leave John’s in its proper place after the other day when he had gotten curious enough to check a few details – propped open on his knee, with the first (important) post open.  _A Study in Pink_.  He still thought it was a stupid name.  Still thought it was stupid that the cases needed names in the first place, too.

“So,” John said.  “Where do you want to start?”

-

Six o’clock found them both still on the sofa, still talking.

Well.  John was doing most of the talking; Sherlock was content to listen, and only interrupt with the occasional question.

“You didn’t have to make such a fuss over my being wrong about the sugar.”

Or complaint.

“But you _were_ wrong,” John countered.  “And since you rarely are, I think it’s important to make it well known when it does happen.  Besides, it’s two sentences.  Out of a page and a half of text.”

Sherlock leaned back into the sofa and folded his arms.  “Five sentences,” he muttered.

John allowed himself an amused smile.  “Of course.  Anything else before we move on?”

“It’s nearly six-fifteen.  You leave for work in an hour,” Sherlock said.

John glanced down at his wrist to confirm the time, and groaned.  “Fuck,” he said through a sigh.

“Cold shower.  Buy yourself a coffee, extra espresso.  Walk to work.”

“Yes, I _know_ how to handle an all-nighter, Sherlock.  I did graduate med school,” he said; the words verged on harsh.  John stood, put the laptop on the coffee table, and rubbed his face.

Sherlock said nothing, and closed his eyes.  When he opened them again, John was no longer in the flat, and there was just a lingering trace of coffee from the kitchen.

-

Sherlock received a text late in the afternoon that day; a single word, from John Watson.  ‘Thai?’

He answered in the affirmative after a moment, and was at least partially relieved that John was not actually upset with him for keeping him up all last night.

-

John came home with a bag of takeaway shortly after six.  Upon finding the living room and kitchen empty, he went back to Sherlock’s room and knocked on the open door.  “Hey.”

Sherlock looked up from his book.  “Oh.  Hey.”

“Did you want to, erm, keep going through my blog?”

After a moment, Sherlock nodded, and he shifted over on his bed when John sat down on the edge and set down his laptop and their dinner.  “I’ll get forks,” John said, and then stood again and went out to the kitchen.

Sherlock adjusted the pillows, sat up properly, and peered into the bag.  Just to make sure John hadn’t forgotten what he liked.

He hadn’t.

-

“Yeah, and then -” John here interrupted himself with a yawn – “you called me an idiot and ran off after the bloody murderer yourself.  Didn’t even let me get dressed first to try and keep up with you.”  He chuckled slightly, then looked down at the head leaning against his shoulder.  “Sherlock?”

The man made no response.  John craned his neck to get a better look, and saw that Sherlock’s eyes were closed, his breathing was steady, and his head was resting comfortably on John’s shoulder.

John smiled.  It was late, of course; it wasn’t a _surprise_ that Sherlock had dozed off.  But that he had dozed off _first_ – well.  That wasn’t something that happened every night.

The laptop was closed and moved to the nightstand next to them, and then John was very careful to shift the both of them that they might lay back more comfortably, in more of a supine than upright position.  And then he pulled the blankets over them, and then he turned the light off, and then he allowed himself to place a gentle kiss on top of the dark head of curls next to him.

-

Sherlock was alone in his bed when he woke late the next morning.

He did not sit up for rather a long time; he stared at the ceiling and thought about John’s storytelling, and about the dream he had had: a case, involving a dismembered body which washed up under various bridges over the Thames over a period of several weeks, and several nights spent on stakeouts with John, and no shortage of romance.

John had told him no such story, nor had he already read such a story on the blog.  He would have to ask John about it this evening.

-

John returned home from work to find the kitchen (relatively) clean, the table cleared of scientific inquiries, and two dinner places set out.  There were seven minutes left on the oven timer, and a closer look revealed a soufflé rising within.

He hung his jacket on the back of the door.  “Sherlock?” he called out to the flat.

The head of dark, and currently damp, curls poked around the corner from the hall.  “Yes?”

“You… made dinner?”

“Obviously.”

John nodded once, after a moment.  “Right.  You made dinner.  You, made dinner.”

Sherlock frowned.  “I did wash everything first.  I put all the chemicals away until it was in the oven.”

“No, I know, just -”  He shook his head quickly.  “Smells delicious.”

The corner of Sherlock’s mouth twitched up as he stepped back out of sight and to his room.  “I am capable of following a recipe.  ’s no different than lab work,” John heard a moment later.  He smiled.

-

John checked his email and the headline news while Sherlock put the finishing touches on dinner – pouring the wine, slicing the baguette and then toasting the slices in the oven for just a moment or two, distributing the salad.

Sherlock didn’t have to call for John’s attention when he pulled the soufflé from the oven; John was curious enough that he had been watching Sherlock overtop his computer the entire time.  And then, he took that as his cue to join Sherlock in the kitchen, and he took a seat at the table.

“Wine?” John asked, picking up the bottle and reading through the label (and checking for a price tag).

“I’m not making dinner from scratch just so you can wash it down with a glass of _milk._ ”  The last word came off his tongue like it physically pained him to consider the idea; John smirked, and set the bottle down.

“So long as you’re not using my card for it,” John said.

Sherlock placed the two soufflé dishes at their respective places.  “Of course not.  Mycroft has a supply, I took a day trip to his place in Kingston.”

“Ah.  Of course.”

Dinner was spent in comfortable silence, save for the occasional question or compliment from John and the corresponding response from Sherlock, and, when they had finished, John brought the dishes to the counter and Sherlock washed and dried them.

“Sherlock?”

“Hm?”  Sherlock found a place for the leftover wine in the fridge and headed for the living room.

“Was – I mean, you don’t – well, you made dinner tonight,” John finally managed to say.

Sherlock sat himself on the sofa and propped his feet up on the coffee table in front of him.  “Yes, I did.”  He picked up a book from the pile and found his place quickly.

John rubbed his neck.  “No, I just – well – _why_?”

Sherlock peered over the top of his book.  “Why did I make dinner?”

John nodded.

“You need to eat.  And if I didn’t do something, you were just going to order takeaway or make pasta.”

He frowned slightly.  “You don’t like my pasta?”

“Gets boring after a few weeks,” Sherlock said, already much more interested in his book than in what John was saying.

John sighed, and turned on the evening news.

-

Sherlock’s earlier question was forgotten until John finally switched off the news and stood to go to bed.

“Oh!”  Sherlock looked up from his book.  “John.”

John paused and turned back to look at him.

“Have we – has there ever been a case with dismembered body parts showing up in the Thames?”  He winced, slightly; it sounded ridiculous to say aloud.

John frowned slightly.  “No…”

Sherlock nodded once, quickly.  “Right.”  He looked back to his book and forced himself to find it more interesting than the problem this answer brought to light.  John watched him for a moment and then did continue on his way upstairs and to bed, and then Sherlock set the book down, and lay back on the sofa, and groaned.

-

Sherlock had not moved from the sofa before John left for work the next morning, and he was still there when John returned home that evening.

John paused in the living room.  “Have you… been there all day?”

Sherlock made no acknowledgement.  John sighed, and started on something for dinner.


	8. square one

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock and John are back consulting on cases for the Met, as per usual.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the case isn't the important part; i saved myself the trouble of having to come up with something clever... i really don't know how i feel about this, i probably should put more effort into finding myself a proper beta and/or britpicker...  
> at any rate, here is a long overdue update, terribly sorry about the wait; i thought i knew where i was going with this and then decided i hated it and so restarted the chapter several times. (that'll teach me to post wip's...) this one is also a bit shorter than the others, i believe.

“I’ve got something I think you’ll like.”

Sherlock sat up on the sofa, much more interested in his phone than the copy of _Angewandte Chemie_ which now fell to the floor.  “Homicide?”

“Yeah,” Greg said.  “Two girls found dead in their rooms, but – well, I can send you some pictures before you come over, if you –”

“Students?”

“City University, yeah.  Alliance House.”

“I’m on my way.”  Sherlock slipped his phone back into his pocket and had his coat on a moment later.

John looked up from his tea in the kitchen.  Of course he’d heard the entire phone call, but…  “Going out?”

“Double homicide.”

“Ah.”  He took a moment too long before returning his attention to his tea.  Sherlock noticed, and John was aware that he noticed.  _Damn._ Didn’t need to come off as desperate.

Regardless of John’s internal wishes, Sherlock hesitated in looping his scarf around his neck.  “…if you haven’t got anything pressing to attend to –” _of course he didn’t, he’d finished his charts for the night an hour ago_ “– you might join me?”  _No, dammit, that sounded ridiculous._

John shook his head.  “No, no, you go on, I’m fine here.”

It wasn’t difficult for Sherlock to see through his easy tone.  “I’m sure everyone would much rather see you there with me than not,” he said after a moment’s consideration.  He smiled slightly for good measure.

John conceded.  “Alright, okay,” he finally said, and dumped the remainder of his tea and fetched his jacket.

-

If John was honest, he was just as surprised as the rest of the Met to see himself standing next to Sherlock in the middle of the bloodied crime scene.  Not that he was going to let them know that.

Sherlock took in the perimeter of the room, ducked back into the hall for a moment, and then approached the dead girl lying face-up in her bed.

Greg approached John, and they both watched everyone’s favourite consulting detective hard at work.  “So,” Greg started, quietly enough that Sherlock wouldn’t accuse them of distracting him, although they all knew he could still hear him perfectly well if he chose to.  “You’re back, then?”

John nodded.  “Mm.  Apparently.  His request.”  He nodded towards Sherlock.

“Does that mean the two of you are…”

He considered Greg’s open question.  “Back to the start, yes,” he finally decided.  And they were.  They were back to where they had been a week after John had moved into Baker Street for the first time.  Though John wasn’t sure if he preferred this to where they had been a few weeks ago, when he still remembered where they had been a year ago.

He caught his thumb rubbing over the place where a wedding band would leave an indentation had it been initially placed on his finger eleven months earlier, and he ceased this motion the moment he noticed it.

-

Thirteen hours after arriving back at Baker Street from the crime scene, Sherlock still had not moved from the position he had taken on the sofa.

John expected this.  John liked this.  This was normal.  Normal was good.

He reminded himself of this as he drank his tea at the kitchen table and looked from the crossword (in which he had filled in half of a word in three hours’ time) to Sherlock (who lay still as John had ever known him to do) and back again.

Dinner would not be missed by the detective, and so John went to up to bed.

-

John went to the kitchen for breakfast the next morning to find the flat empty.

Sherlock had moved from the sofa, and had taken his shoes and his coat, and had gone off somewhere.

Fuck if John knew where that was.

-

By noontime that day, John had called in sick to the clinic, and had thoroughly perused all of the papers Sherlock had taken from the scene which pertained to the case.  He had called Sherlock’s mobile four times at various intervals before he finally went to make toast for lunch and finding the bloody thing behind the loaf of bread in the pantry.

Well.  At least Sherlock had eaten before he ran off.

John texted Greg, who replied with the standard ‘Yeah, I’ll keep an eye out for the idiot,’ and then there was nothing more John could do, so he sat in his chair and did nothing.

-

The call came at half past one the next morning.  John answered halfway through the first ring and only briefly glanced at the name on the screen.  “Yeah?”

“He’s here,” Greg sighed.  “Came in five minutes ago dragging some kid along behind him in handcuffs.  Apparently this kid’s our killer.”

John closed his eyes.  He allowed himself a moment to feel relieved, and then allowed himself to be very much pissed off.  “I’m on my way.  Don’t let him out of your sight.”

Greg’s smile could be heard through the line.  “I’ve got to get a statement out of him, anyway.”

-

Sherlock signed the bottom of the page which Sargent Donovan had pushed towards him, and then he left the office with a flourish of his coat.

He nearly tripped over something when he rounded the corner of the hall with his nose in his phone and a smirk on his face.  A fist caught him with a strong right hook before he could manage so much as a muttered apology.

“You _idiot_!”

Sherlock rubbed his face and looked at John with something akin to surprise.  Disbelief, even.  “I –”

“Shut _up_ , you complete fucking _idiot_ , you do not get to start pulling shit like this, I don’t care how interesting the case is or how goddamn urgent your lead is, you do _not_ get to start running off at two in the morning without a word of warning!”

Sherlock blinked.

John caught his breath and flexed his fist.

“So… you’re –”

“Yes, I’m fucking upset!  You do not get to run off, I had no clue where you had gone, you left your damn mobile in the cupboard, you were gone at _least_ eighteen hours without giving me a word as to if you were even _alive_ , what the _fuck_ was I to have done if something had happened to you, I wouldn’t even have _known_ , dammit!”

By this point John was using the majority of his body to pin Sherlock’s to the wall, and he had one hand in a fist on the taller man’s shoulder, and his forehead rested against his chest.

Sherlock did not say anything, and he did not move.  He wasn’t certain what he might have said or done in any case, nor of what he was supposed to do in such a situation.  So they stood there, the two of them, and Sherlock looked down at John and the posture he picked up when he hadn’t slept nearly enough, and John wondered if he hadn’t fucked this up too badly because now his head was on Sherlock’s chest and he couldn’t just _do_ that anymore, they weren’t _together_ , he couldn’t just damn near _hug_ him in front of the entirety of the Met no matter how relieved he was to see him safe.

“Promise me that much,” John finally said.  “Promise me, you won’t go running off, you won’t just disappear, you won’t leave me with no way of finding you.”

Sherlock nodded once.  His lips almost brushed the top of John’s head of golden blond and grey hairs – quite by coincidence, of course; they weren’t _together_ , this man was nothing more than a concerned flatmate who had lost people before and didn’t want to endure that again and Sherlock himself was nothing more than the man who had pissed him off so much by vanishing in the night, and so Sherlock didn’t do things like kissing the top of the other’s head to express some amount of remorse for his actions.

“Fine,” Sherlock said.  “No more running off before waking you, and no more leaving my phone behind the bread.”

John picked his head up and cleared his throat, and the _look_ he managed to give Sherlock without yet appearing to be any more distraught than he would be over an empty mug of tea…

Sherlock nodded again.  “I promise.”

-

The man responsible for the murders of the two girls in their rooms was an idiot, in the end – he confessed quickly, and was put away in a holding cell.  Sherlock and John were gone by this time, seated next on opposite sides of the backseat of a cab.

John stared out the window in silence.  Sherlock looked between the driver and his own window, with the occasional glance at John’s reflection in the window.  The ride continued with an awkward quiet, with the exception of a ‘just here’ from John as they neared the flat, followed by his hasty departure from the vehicle to leave Sherlock to pay the fare.

Sherlock made it upstairs and found the shower already occupied, and so he sighed, and went to bed.  He slept a fitful thirteen hours, more than in part due to his desire to interact as little as possible with John Watson after the incidents of that night.

John Watson was a dangerous man when he was angry.  Sherlock knew this; he had deduced it the first time he saw the man next to his hospital bed upon waking from his coma, and he would not forget it any time soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always, comments and kudos are always appreciated; i'm on tumblr @reichenpach for those of you who are curious.


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